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Helen Papagiannis is a designer specializing in augmented reality. She’s spoken at TEDx about the creative side of AR, which was highlighted as one of the top talks about AR and the gamification of life and worked for the internationally renown Bruce Mau Design.

And now she’s putting out a Augmented Reality Pop-Up Book for mobile devices using image recognition. The book can be enjoyed alone or with the enhanced graphics using an iPad2 or iPhone4.

What I like most about her Pop-Up book is that Helen gets what AR is all about. Or really what it is–a medium to transfer information. If you handed the book and the iPad2 to a child and told them to play around, you wouldn’t have to worry that they wouldn’t “get” augmented reality. They wouldn’t require an explanation or that “AR is that thing on the first down line in football.” They would just play.

Helen is a natural storyteller, as seen by TEDx talk. Even her twitter account is called @ARStories (I wish I’d thought of that one.) She gets that AR is all about telling stories in new and interesting ways, whatever the level of technology. She used the tools at hand, in this case the AR browser Junaio, to make her Pop-Up book.

And as the technology advances, so too will the level of stories being told. I expect from this simple Pop-Up book, that we’ll be seeing more of Helen for quite some time.

Personally, I find tablet devices boring (not that I will object getting one). They simply pale in comparison to some of Mac Funamizu’s creations. But, as the iPad2 is all the rage right now, here are a few augmented reality demos running on it, making it a little bit cooler.

If you have a video of your AR app running on the iPad2, shoot me an email or leave a comment.

String on an iPad 2:

Metaio’s Junaio on an iPad 2:

Total Immersion’s Magic Mirror on an iPad 2 (first covered by Thomas):

Augmented reality is all about illusion. Most applications project graphics on the real world. But this HoloToy creates the illusion of a real space within iPhone or iPad, similar to the LevelHead game from last year. The game has a number of modes including a Scarab Attack game, floating planets and a pet robot to interact with. Most of them can be seen in this video.

While the Apple iPad Tablet announcement last month was disappointing for augmented reality developers and enthusiasts, the details about the upcoming Dell Tablet will make you salivate.

The Mini 5 will have a five inch touchscreen with both front and user facing cameras allowing full augmented reality capabilities. WiFi and 3G connectivity allow enough bandwidth and the 1.0 GHz Snapdragon Qualcomm processor will give the Mini 5 the juice it needs to power resource-expensive AR apps. It’ll run the latest version of the Android OS which gives it AR credentials right away since there are many apps already made for that system.

The price plan will affect the market that it’s trying to fill, though Dell says they will price it “competitively”. But I don’t think I could have asked for better features from a tablet for augmented reality. The weight of the device might impact AR since holding it up will be harder than a smartphone and since it’s a touchscreen, will you want to hold it with one hand and navigate with the other? I hope some AR developers can incorporate voice commands into their games and products.

And while the screen might be too small in this version, they have eluded to a suite of tablet products so maybe a larger iPad sized version might come out in the future. Personally, I already have a free smartphone from work, so a tablet that does different things on a bigger screen would be appealing to me.

Will this be a killer device for AR? Probably not. But it’ll give developers a bigger landscape to play on and increase the number of AR devices on the market. The front facing camera certainly makes is a no-brainer for video conferencing. Just add some facial recognition and you can talk to your kids while out on the road with bunny ears attached to your head.

Unless you’ve been living in a box today, you know that Apple finally unveiled the tablet iPad today. The biggest surprise about the announcement was the lack of a camera on the lap sized PC. No camera, really? If you don’t believe it, check the official spec page.

Besides the implications for augmented reality, which I’ll get to in a moment, the iPad not having a camera is a giant fail. I actually expected the iPad to have two cameras. One forward-looking so the iPad could function as a giant Polaroid and the other user-facing so videos could be recorded. We could forgive eliminating one of them, probably the forward-looking one since its so big, but not having the user-facing camera is inexcusable.

The series of tubes we call the Internet has moved beyond simple text. People want to record and upload videos straight to YouTube without having to yank out their dust-covered hand held or use Skype to call their friends while they’re watching the game.

The Apple iPad not having even one camera is like hooking up satellite without DVR. Sure you can do it, but why?

Of course, I’m being overly melodramatic here.

The real point to the iPad is competition for the Kindle, eReader and the Nook. Apple wants to revolutionize the way we read magazines, books and newspapers. Functionality for augmented reality isn’t even an afterthought. How many people are using their camera lying in bed reading an interactive book?

And is this a major setback for augmented reality? Not really. A giant-sized magic lens would add a fun new canvas to play with, but really wouldn’t be a game changer. Additionally, Apple isn’t expecting the tablet market to come even close to the smartphone market in sales.

So in the end, the iPad is a fail for augmented reality, but will probably give Jeff Bezos nightmares for months as he wonders how he’s going to compete against a Pentium 286 when he’s selling a Commodore 64.

And maybe, just maybe, Steve Jobs is still working on a see-through AR-enabled HMD. Then I’d say, all is forgiven Stevie, I’m coming home to Apple.